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At new center, physicians use high-tech tools to test patients for diseases.
Mary Washington Hospital's new endoscopy center is where doctors can examine patients' insides, using a high-tech video scopeDate published: 3/13/2005 By JIM HALL R. JOHN C. SPIVEY JR. was a third-year medical student at the University of Virginia when a physician came to the school to demonstrate a new way of inspecting the colon with a flexible scope. "Everybody said, 'That can't possibly work,'" Spivey recalled. The technique did work. In fact, it worked better than the technique then being used, the X-ray and barium enema. Today, 40 years later, the flexible scope, called the endoscope, is an important tool in the arsenal of physicians like Spivey. Gastroenterologists, pulmonologists and other physicians are doing 8,000 endoscopic examinations a year at Mary Washington Hospital. And now they are doing these tests, for colon cancer and other diseases, in the hospital's new Endoscopy Center. The center has moved downstairs to the first floor of the hospital in quarters that are four times larger than its former home on the second floor. Dr. David B. Rice said he can't help but compare the new center with the facilities he had when he did the area's first endoscopy in 1971. He did the procedure in a cramped closet on the first floor at the old Mary Washington Hospital on Fall Hill Avenue. "There wasn't enough room for the patient to lie with their feet stretched out," Rice recalled. The new center features six private preparation bays and 14 private recovery rooms, a change from the curtained areas that were in the second-floor center. Six new procedure rooms have replaced the three procedure rooms in the old center. The new center opened Feb. 7. Each day nearly 30 people visit the center to have their insides checked. Doctors look at the patient's lungs, colon, stomach or intestines. They do these inspections without an incision and with a minimum of anesthesia. The tool they use, the endoscope, is a black, snakelike tube, about 5 feet long and as wide as a pencil. A doctor inserts the tube into the patient's mouth or anus and steers it slowly through the bends of the inner body. "The major role of the scope is to diagnose in a nonsurgical way," said Dr. Frank J. DeTrane, a Fredericksburg gastroenterologist.
Date published: 3/13/2005
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